Sun, Jun 10 2007
WE ARE THE TERMITE PEOPLE
Gads! And it ends up in our homes, on our floors...
There's a scene in an amazing movie called "The Emerald Forest" in which the tribal elder talks about the outside world, calling them the "termite people", people who chew up the grandfather trees and leave raw devastation in their wake...
Chinese demand drives global deforestation
NGAMBE-TIKAR, Cameroon (Reuters) - From outside, Cameroon's Ngambe-Tikar forest looks like a compact, tangled mass of healthy emerald green foliage.
But tracks between the towering tropical hardwood trees open up into car park-sized clearings littered with logs as long as buses.
Forestry officers say the reserve is under attack from unscrupulous commercial loggers who work outside authorized zones and do not respect size limits in their quest for maximum financial returns.
"I lack words to describe what is going on here," says Richard Greine, head of the local forestry post, 350 km (220 miles) north of Cameroon's capital Yaounde.
"Both illegal and authorized exploiters have staged a hold-up on the forest."
From central Africa to the Amazon basin and Indonesia's islands, the world's great forests are being lost at an annual rate of at least 13 million hectares (32 million acres) -- an area the size of Greece or Nicaragua.
The timber business is worth billions of dollars annually, and experts say few industries that size are as murky as the black market in wood.
Evidence of rampant deforestation around the globe points in one direction: booming demand in China, where economic growth is fuelling a timber feeding frenzy.
In just the past decade, China has grown from importing wood products for domestic use to become the world's leading exporter of furniture, plywood and flooring.
Chinese firms might not be chopping down the trees themselves, but their insatiable appetite is driving up prices, spurring loggers to open more tracks like those torn through Ngambe-Tikar and drawing huge global investment to the companies.
COLONIAL RELICS
In Mande village on the fringe of the Cameroon jungle, Pierre, a hunter dressed in tattered shorts and T-shirt, does not know that more than half his country's original forest cover has been cut down in his lifetime.
But he knows the local eco-system has been ravaged.
Once upon a time, wild animals would sometimes stroll right into his compound. "These days you don't see any. They don't fall into our traps anymore. You need to go very far, deep in the forest to see or catch one," he tells Reuters.
As usual, it is the poorest who pay.
In nearby Democratic Republic of Congo, the lure of timber wealth has seen loggers accused of cheating villagers with deals activists say are a "shameful relic of colonial times."
A two-year investigation by Greenpeace accused companies, mostly from Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Singapore and the United States, of illegally acquiring titles to about 15 million hectares (37 million acres) of Congolese rainforest after a 2002 moratorium.
In return for small gifts such as farm tools, bags of salt and cases of beer, the firms won logging rights worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the probe found.
The biggest target of the loggers is Afromosia, or African teak, which can sell for hundreds of dollars a cubic meter.
Locals in one village, Lamoko, Greenpeace says, gave away thousands of hectares for presents worth only about $20,000.
Depressingly similar accusations mar the logging industry in Brazil, home to most of the Amazon basin -- the planet's largest remaining tropical rainforest.
FOREIGN MERCENARIES
About a fifth of Brazil's Amazon has already been destroyed, and Chinese demand for commodities such as iron ore, bauxite and especially soy, has been a big factor in pushing the country's agricultural frontier further north.
Most illegal logging is done by Brazilians, either poor migrants from the dry northeast or cattle ranchers and soy farmers coming in from the south.
The government has long been criticized for deforestation and has a very public policy of stopping illegal clearing and slowing clearing rates overall. But the frontier area is very remote, and police are underfunded, disorganized and often corrupt.
Spinning the globe further west, the problem is perhaps even more acute in Indonesia.
Without drastic action, the United Nations says, 98 percent of its remaining forests will be gone by 2022, with dire consequences for local people and wildlife, including endangered rhinos, tigers and orangutans.
In parts of Borneo and Sumatra, for instance, scientists are still finding new species of animals and plants but fear these could be lost to science before being studied fully.
Jakarta says illegal tree felling is ravaging 37 of its 41 national parks, and now accounts for about three-quarters of all logging in Indonesia.
Like the United Nations, it blames a well-organized, shadowy network of multinational firms it says are increasingly targeting its parks as one of the few remaining sources of commercial timber supplies.
The government has deployed soldiers at least three times in recent years to confiscate wood and chase out loggers, and is training quick response ranger teams to police protected areas.
But experts say the new units are crippled by lack of funds, vehicles, weapons and equipment, and face a huge threat from loggers who are often guarded by heavily armed militia led by foreign mercenaries.
"At this rate, by 2012 the forests in Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi will be gone, only the forests in Papua will be left," local environmental campaigner Rully Sumada tells Reuters. "And if cutting of trees continues, no forest will be left by 2022."
BARCODES AND PYGMIES
The plight of forests is a focus of a June 3-15 United Nations meeting in The Hague that gathers signatories of a global pact to save threatened species.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) already includes Latin America's bigleaf mahogany and Southeast Asia's ramin and agarwood trees in Appendix II, which requires strict trade controls to protect them.
Ramin, for instance, is sought after to make picture frames, pool cues, parquet flooring and decorative mouldings.
But Brazilwood, used to produce violin bows, was the only tree species to win tighter protection at the U.N. meeting in the Hague. Bids to curb logging of South and Central American cedar and rosewood trees, the source of some of the world's most valuable timber, failed after objections by several countries.
Many poor nations want the rich world to extend the Kyoto Protocol, the main U.N. plan for fighting global warming, to give farmers credits for letting forests stand rather than sell trees to loggers or clear land for crops.
Trees soak up carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they rot or are burnt.
The United States and the European Union -- the second and third biggest markets for Indonesian timber after China -- have both agreed in principle to ensure Indonesian forest product imports are verified as legal.
But experts say the amount of investment in the logging companies from the industrialized world vastly outstrips donor efforts to help Jakarta.
Trying to cut into the loggers' vast illicit profits, activists are fighting back with campaigns to persuade Western consumers to ask questions about where their wood comes from.
The Geneva-based Tropical Forest Trust (TFT), a charity set up in 1999, has launched a programme in Indonesia under which a tree destined for felling is given a unique barcode.
The idea is to let buyers identify verified legal wood from sustainable sources, TFT executive director Scott Poynton says.
"The international wood business is so full of traders and middlemen operating in a world of bribes, corruption and illegal practices that, unfortunately, we encourage buyers to assume everyone is guilty until proven otherwise," Poynton says.
He sees China as a major problem, sucking up illegal timber from all over the world and re-exporting it.
TFT also works in central Africa, where it has issued the latest computer technology to illiterate pygmy communities desperate to save their forest homes in the Republic of Congo, across the jungle border from Cameroon's Ngambe-Tikar.
Using touch screens on specially designed handheld global positioning system (GPS) units, the villagers mark the location of everything from sacred trees to crucial water sources and ancestral graveyards. The data is compiled and the timber companies are supposed to work around the important areas.
ANYTHING "AT A PRICE"
And TFT is working in China helping factories eliminate illegal supplies by identifying where their wood comes from.
While much of the world's illegal logging is driven by China's hunger for wood, few of the teak floorboards and ebony tables rolling out of its sawmills and factories end up in its own booming, smog-shrouded cities.
Despite rising incomes, few people can afford them. Instead, most of the valuable logs are exported as solid wood furniture, boards, or just veneer on cheaper products.
Centuries of domestic demand have slashed China's own forests, and demand for foreign supplies soared after Beijing tried to halt logging in remaining pockets in the 1990s after massive runoff from denuded slopes contributed to deadly floods along the Yangtze River.
But China's leaders appear to have little concern about exporting those problems to immediate neighbors or countries further away.
Under the glare of the international spotlight, they say they have clamped down on illegal imports from poor neighbor Myanmar.
But in the Nu river valley which runs along much of that frontier, piles of trunks over a meter thick are stacked by the valley mouth of most cross-border roads and loaded trunks trundle south.
In the regional hub of Mangshi, a trader surrounded by stacks of cheaper Chinese wood says he has no teak to hand but can order anything from across the border "at a price."
"If you know what you want, I have contacts in Myanmar who can get it within a couple of days," he tells a customer.
(Additional reporting by Daniel Wallis in Nairobi, Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing, Mita Valina Liem in Jakarta and Andrea Welsh in Sau Paulo)Sun, Jun 10 2007
PUT RABID DOGS DOWN
I have no problem with the death penalty. Some crimes are so heinous that no rehabilitation, no revenge, no reparation, no justice can ever be possible. In these cases the best thing to do is permanently neutralize the offending organism and stop wasting taxpayer resources. I do agree with those who complain that the justice system is flawed and unfair. But that's different than putting down, for example, monsters like Dennis Rader or Gary Ridgeway.
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Studies say death penalty deters crime
Associated Press - Anti-death penalty forces have gained momentum in the past few years, with a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey.
The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations pointing out flaws in the justice system has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.
So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey's commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body of knowledge on deterrence as "inconclusive."
But the ferocious argument in academic circles could eventually spread to a wider audience, as it has in the past.
"Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it," said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. "The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect."
A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. "The results are robust, they don't really go away," he said. "I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) what am I going to do, hide them?"
Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).
To explore the question, they look at executions and homicides, by year and by state or county, trying to tease out the impact of the death penalty on homicides by accounting for other factors, such as unemployment data and per capita income, the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and more.
Among the conclusions:
Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five and 14).
The Illinois moratorium on executions in 2000 led to 150 additional homicides over four years following, according to a 2006 study by professors at the University of Houston.
Speeding up executions would strengthen the deterrent effect. For every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor.
In 2005, there were 16,692 cases of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter nationally. There were 60 executions.
The studies' conclusions drew a philosophical response from a well-known liberal law professor, University of Chicago's Cass Sunstein. A critic of the death penalty, in 2005 he co-authored a paper titled "Is capital punishment morally required?"
"If it's the case that executing murderers prevents the execution of innocents by murderers, then the moral evaluation is not simple," he told The Associated Press. "Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven't given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty."
Sunstein said that moral questions aside, the data needs more study.
Critics of the findings have been vociferous.
Some claim that the pro-deterrent studies made profound mistakes in their methodology, so their results are untrustworthy. Another critic argues that the studies wrongly count all homicides, rather than just those homicides where a conviction could bring the death penalty. And several argue that there are simply too few executions each year in the United States to make a judgment.
"We just don't have enough data to say anything," said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the Wharton School of Business who last year co-authored a sweeping critique of several studies, and said they were "flimsy" and appeared in "second-tier journals."
"This isn't left vs. right. This is a nerdy statistician saying it's too hard to tell," Wolfers said. "Within the advocacy community and legal scholars who are not as statistically adept, they will tell you it's still an open question. Among the small number of economists at leading universities whose bread and butter is statistical analysis, the argument is finished."
Several authors of the pro-deterrent reports said they welcome criticism in the interests of science, but said their work is being attacked by opponents of capital punishment for their findings, not their flaws.
"Instead of people sitting down and saying 'let's see what the data shows,' it's people sitting down and saying 'let's show this is wrong,'" said Paul Rubin, an economist and co-author of an Emory University study. "Some scientists are out seeking the truth, and some of them have a position they would like to defend."
The latest arguments replay a 1970s debate that had an impact far beyond academic circles.
Then, economist Isaac Ehrlich had also concluded that executions deterred future crimes. His 1975 report was the subject of mainstream news articles and public debate, and was cited in papers before the
U.S. Supreme Court arguing for a reversal of the court's 1972 suspension of executions. (The court, in 1976, reinstated the death penalty.)
Ultimately, a panel was set up by the National Academy of Sciences which decided that Ehrlich's conclusions were flawed. But the new pro-deterrent studies haven't gotten that kind of scrutiny.
At least not yet. The academic debate, and the larger national argument about the death penalty itself with questions about racial and economic disparities in its implementation shows no signs of fading away.
Steven Shavell, a professor of law and economics at Harvard Law School and co-editor-in-chief of the American Law and Economics Review, said in an e-mail exchange that his journal intends to publish several articles on the statistical studies on deterrence in an upcoming issue.Sun, Jun 10 2007
LET'S INVADE LIEBERMAN
Unbelievably, this monumental buffoon is still being taken seriously by a few misguided idiots. I say we use the combined armed might of the United States of America and invade *his* sorry ass. Maybe he can get a hero's welcome from the folks in Fushe Kruje, Albania.
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Lieberman: U.S. should weigh Iran attack
WASHINGTON - Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Sunday the United States should consider a military strike against Iran because of Tehran's involvement in Iraq.
"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."
The U.S. accuses Iran of fostering terrorism and Tehran's nuclear ambitions have brought about international reproach.
Lieberman, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000 who now represents Connecticut as an independent, spoke of Iranians' role in the continued violence in Iraq.
"We've said so publicly that the Iranians have a base in Iran at which they are training Iraqis who are coming in and killing Americans. By some estimates, they have killed as many as 200 American soldiers," Lieberman said. "Well, we can tell them we want them to stop that. But if there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them."
He added, "If they don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing."
Lieberman said much of the action could probably be done by air, although he would leave the strategy to the generals in charge. "I want to make clear I'm not talking about a massive ground invasion of Iran," Lieberman said.
"They can't believe that they have immunity for training and equipping people to come in and kill Americans," he said. "We cannot let them get away with it. If we do, they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home."
To deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions, Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said tough negotiation is called for.
"I would talk to them, but I would build an international coalition that would promote and push economic sanctions on them," Richardson said. "Sanctions would work on Iran. They are susceptible to disinvestment policy. They are susceptible to cuts, economic sanctions in commodities."
On Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran's detention of at least four Americans is unwarranted but will not stop Washington from trying to engage Iran on other matters, including its disputed nuclear program and alleged support of insurgents in Iraq.
In an Associated Press interview, Rice also appeared to cast doubt on whether the U.S. would take its tentative diplomatic outreach to Iran any further for now.
The U.S. and Iranian ambassadors in Iraq met last month for the first public, substantive high-level discussions the two countries have held in nearly three decades. Although limited to the topic of violence and instability in Iraq, the talks have been seen as a possible window to better relations.
Immediately after the meeting in Baghdad, Iran announced plans for another. But U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Washington would decide only after the Iraqi government issued an invitation.
U.S. officials also said they wanted to see Iran follow up on U.S. complaints that it is equipping and helping insurgents who attack American forces.
Lieberman spoke on "Face the Nation" on CBS. Richardson was on "Late Edition" on CNN.
Sun, Jun 10 2007
WHERE?
Aaaaaaaahahahahaha! Dubya had to go all the way to Albania and threaten the Russkies just to get a decent approval rating! Go Bushie! Go Bushie! w00t! w00t!
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[U.S. President George Bush greets Albanians in Fushe Kruje, Albania, Sunday, June 10, 2007. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)]
Bush receives hero's welcome in Albania
TIRANA, Albania, Associated Press - President Bush, enthusiastically welcomed as the first U.S. president in this former communist nation, served notice Sunday he is running out of patience with Russia's objections to independence for neighboring Kosovo.
"Sooner rather than later you've got to say `Enough's enough Kosovo is independent,'" Bush said, telling Albanians what they wanted to hear. He said independence was a certainty.
Nearing the end of an eight-day trip, Bush got a hero's reception in this desperately poor country, still struggling to recover from being cut off from the rest of the world for four decades under the harsh rule of dictator Enver Hoxha. Hoxha died in 1985, and Albania emerged from isolation in 1990 but still is one of Europe's most impoverished lands.
Cannons boomed salutes from mountains overlooking the capital. Huge banners proclaimed "Proud to be Partners," and billboards read "President Bush in Albania Making History."
At home, Bush's job approval rating stands at its all-time low. But here, Prime Minister Sali Berisha said Bush was Albania's "greatest and most distinguished guest we have ever had in all times."
Throngs of people grasped Bush's hands, arms and fingers on the streets of Fushe Kruje, a small town near the airport where he stopped to chat in a cafe with business owners. Unused to such adoring crowds in America, Bush reveled in the attention. He kissed women on the cheek, posed for pictures and signed autographs. Someone reached out and rubbed his gray hair.
"Bushie, Bushie," people shouted. Some of the business people have received small loans under U.S. government programs.
The scene was uncharacteristically wild for a presidential crowd. Bush spokesman Dana Perino said later that the Secret Service assured Bush's safety, as always. "If they didn't think the president was safe, obviously they wouldn't have put him in that position," she said.
While the United States supports Albania's bid for membership in NATO, Bush said this country still has to make more political and military reforms and crack down on corruption and organized crime.
"We are determined to take any decision, pass any law and undertake any reform to make Albania appropriate to receive the invitation" to join the western military alliance, Berisha said at a news conference with Bush.
Albania has eagerly embraced democracy and idolizes the United States. Three stamps have been issued featuring Bush's picture and the Statue of Liberty, and the street in front of parliament has been renamed in his honor.
The president spent just eight hours here and then flew to Bulgaria, another Cold War Soviet ally turned pro-American. The two stops gave an upbeat ending to Bush's six-country trip after big protests earlier in Rome and at the summit of industrialized nations in Heiligendamm, Germany.
Kosovo has been run by the United Nations and NATO since 1999, when Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's forces were ousted after a NATO air war ended his crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's population.
The U.N. Security Council has been divided over Kosovo's independence. The United States and key European countries support Kosovo's statehood while Russia, traditionally a Serbian ally, opposes it. Moscow says it would set a dangerous precedent for other breakaway regions.
Bush said diplomats from the United States, Russia and European Union will try to find common ground on a formula for independence.
"But if it's apparent that that's not going to happen in a relatively quick period of time, in my judgment, we need to put forward the (U.N.) resolution," Bush said. "Hence, deadline." He did not specify a date.
Negotiations must result in "certain independence," Bush said. "That's what's important to know."
Bush said the summit in Heiligendamm had tried to determine whether there was a way to make Kosovo independence acceptable to Russia. French President Nicolas Sarkozy unexpectedly called for a delay on the issue, and the summit failed to reach agreement.
Bush urged Albania to help maintain peace and calm in Kosovo as the independence talks move forward.
Predominantly Muslim, Albania has 140 troops in Afghanistan and about 120 troops in Iraq a presence that President Alfred Moisiu says will not end as long as the Americans are engaged there. Bush met here with some of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Albanians know the horror of tyranny," the president said. "And so they're working to bring the hope of freedom to people who haven't known it. And that's a noble effort and a sacrifice."
In saluting Albania's democracy, Bush praised it as a country that has "cast off the shackles of a very oppressive society and is now showing the world what's possible."
During his visit, the president had lunch with the prime ministers of Albania, Macedonia and Croatia, which hope to join NATO.Sun, Jun 10 2007
SAVING THE WORLD ONE EYEBALL AT A TIME
Okay, so I've been playing around with the blog software features, and I got the "more" command to work, meaning that long articles will not be published complete on the front page. I will include several paragraphs and then to read the rest of the news article you just click through where it says "More yaddah". Less boring that way.
In this post, I will play with some other commands, see how they come out.
Apparently, the comments commands are totally FUBARed. That's actually okay, since I'm not overly fond of feedback. If I want your opinion, I'll tell it to you ;)
I'm thinking once I'm ready to take this site to the next level, I'll migrate everything over to Movable Type or something equally robust. This little blog software is great for what it does, but that's all it does.
Sun, Jun 10 2007
ENDURING FREEDOM
Great. Teach them to kill, fuck up their heads, and send them home to be "normal". We are already seeing marked increases in suicides, homicides, domestic violence and drug/alcohol abuse among returning vets. It happened in 'Nam, too - we fucked those boys up, and expected them to be fine when they came home. We do not take care of our own, apparently.
Soldiers struggle to find therapists
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Soldiers returning from war are finding it more difficult to get mental health treatment because military insurance is cutting payments to therapists, on top of already low reimbursement rates and a tangle of red tape.
Wait lists now extend for months to see a military doctor and it can takes weeks to find a private therapist willing to take on members of the military. The challenge appears great in rural areas, where many National Guard and Reserve troops and their families live.
To avoid the hassles of Tricare, the military health insurance program, one frustrated therapist opted to provide an hour of therapy time a week to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for free. Barbara Romberg, a clinical psychologist in the Washington, D.C., area, has started a group that encourages other therapists to do the same.
"They're not going to pay me much in terms of my regular rate anyway," Romberg said. "So I'm actually feeling positive that I've given, rather than feeling frustrated for what I'm going through to get payment."
Joyce Lindsey, 46, of Troutdale, Ore., sought grief counseling after her husband died in Afghanistan last December. The therapist recommended by her physician would not take Tricare. Lindsey eventually found one on a provider list, but the process took two months.
"It was kind of frustrating," Lindsey said. "I thought, 'Am I ever going to find someone to take this?'"
Roughly one-third of returning soldiers seek out mental health counseling in their first year home. They are among the 9.1 million people covered by Tricare, a number that grew by more than 1 million since 2001.
Tricare's psychological health benefit is "hindered by fragmented rules and policies, inadequate oversight and insufficient reimbursement," the Defense Department's mental health task force said last month after reviewing the military's psychological care system.
The Tricare office that serves Fort Campbell, Ky., and Fort Bragg, N.C. Army posts with heavy war deployments told task force members that it routinely fields complaints about the difficulty in locating mental health specialists who accept Tricare.
"Unfortunately, in some of our communities ... we are maxed out on the available providers," said Lois Krysa, the office's quality manager. "In other areas, the providers just are not willing to sign up to take Tricare assignment, and that is a problem."
Tricare's reimbursement rate is tied to Medicare's, which pays less than civilian employer insurance. The rate for mental health care services fell by 6.4 percent this year as part of an adjustment in reimbursements to certain specialties.
Since 2004, Tricare has sped up payments to encourage more doctors to participate, said Austin Camacho, a Tricare spokesman. In some locations, such as Idaho and Alaska, the Defense Department has also raised rates to attract physicians, he said.
"We are working hard to overcome those challenges," Camacho said.
Jack Wagoner is a retired military officer and psychologist and psychiatrist in private practice who also works for a Tricare contractor. He told defense mental health board members last December that in general, Tricare pays "considerably lower" than private health insurance plans.
According to data from Tricare's Medical Benefits and Reimbursement System office, Tricare pays mental health providers as much or more than a corporate plan would pay a therapist for treating a patient although in some cases it is lower.
There are different coverage plans within Tricare, and the amount paid to providers varies by plan, location, specialty and services performed.
Psychologists who treat active duty troops are paid 66 percent of what Tricare views as the customary rate. So a psychologist eligible for a customary rate of $120 per hour would be paid $79.20 for the hour by Tricare, even if the psychologist's standard rate is $150 per hour.
Active duty troops use Tricare Prime, a managed-care option maintained by private contractors. Their mental health care is free. Guard and Reserve troops and their families frequently use Tricare Standard, a fee-for-service plan. They pay an annual deductible and 20 percent of the amount Tricare pays the therapist.
John Class, a retired Navy health care administrator who now advocates on health issues for the Military Officers Association of America, said Tricare Prime contractors insist that the lower reimbursement rates has made it tougher to maintain a network of providers.
"We are already starting to see the pinch," Class said.
In a limited study by Tricare released earlier this year, about two out of three civilian psychiatrists in 20 states were willing to accept Tricare Standard clients among their new patients, the lowest acceptance rate for any specialty.
Any additional cuts in Tricare payouts could mean that "some really good psychologists who specialize in this treatment and are experienced will be seeing less of (military families)," said clinical psychologist Marion Frank, a widow who is president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Gold Star Wives of America, a support group for military widows.
In parts of Montana, some families drive two hours to see a physician of any kind that will take Tricare, said Dorrie Hagan, state family program director for the Montana National Guard.
"When you get away from a city of any size then you start struggling for providers, and they'll tell you flat out it's because of the rate of pay," Hagan said.
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On the Net:
Defense Department's Mental Health Task Force: http://www.ha.osd.mil/dhb/mhtf/default.cfm
Tricare: http://www.tricare.mil/
Give an Hour: http://www.giveanhour.orgAll news articles and images provided under the Fair Use Notice.